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Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

theregister.com

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Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#71

Post by ajross »

JimDabell wrote: post #67
ajross wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs clearly wasn't resistant to app stores. He literally had one in the works when the product shipped. It just wasn't ready, so he spun a yarn about web apps (and yes: he was ahead of his time, and these days you can totally do that, but now that Apple owns that 30% fee, they're decidedly anti web apps).

> Jobs clearly wasn't resistant to app stores. He literally had one in the works when the product shipped. This is a myth. Jobs was genuinely against a native SDK and made the final decision to go for it on the 2nd of October 2007. Then Apple had to rush out the first version of the iPhoneOS SDK in just over three months. This is documented in contemporaneous emails produced during discovery for the Epic trial. https…

> It’s been 15% for years. The only people who pay 30% are people who earn more than a million dollars a year through the App Store. Almost everybody pays 15%.

Right. And by the same logic Amazon makes exactly zero revenue from AWS, which is completely free for "almost everybody". You knew what I meant.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#72

Post by karmakurtisaani »

JimDabell wrote: post #63
foobarian wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was some fancy 6 inch or so Nokia PDA from around that time that was supposed to be amazing. It had all the good hacker features - it ran Linux, it had driver support, you could ssh from it, etc. I remember turning it on and seeing kernel printk logs scrolling, followed by the plain X cross-thatch, and then some home grown window manager where you had to use a stylus to move the mouse cursor to click on stuff.…

Their S60 phones were based on Symbian and had a web browser based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore at the end of 2005. By all accounts they were good, hackable, general-purpose mobile devices. Then Steven Elop left Microsoft to become Nokia CEO; decided to move everything to Windows Phone; publicly pointed out everything was on fire; crashed the stock price by 85%; sold Nokia to Microsoft at a massive discount; and the…

Well, Nokia also got a good chunk of cash for the phones division, and it didn't exactly turn into a cash cow for MS. So, maybe Nokia got the better end of that stick in the end.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#73

Post by kmeisthax »

>Mobile phones are not complex to use because of bad interface design, they are complex to use because they are complex devices with a myriad of features.

I'm reminded of Linus Torvalds' rant about CVS[0] and SVN giving people brain damage. While this quote is obviously hyperbolic to the point of being offensive and demeaning, there's some truth to it. People whose only experience is with CVS and SVN might just assume that all version control has to be built in that weirdly clunky and centralized way. Likewise, people who have only ever used the garbage UIs on underpowered phones confused user hostility for essential complexity.

[0] Concurrent Versions System, not the US drugstore that used to be called Consumer Value Stores

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#74

Post by wrs »

ajross wrote: post #55
wrs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone was a software innovation that was years ahead of the industry at the time, enabled by that one hardware innovation that you’re sounding rather dismissive of.

I don't think I'm "dismissing" anything. I replied to a comment that made what I think is an incorrect point about how the product was received at release. It's too easy to take a successful product and mythologize its origins, when in fact history was complicated and in a lot of ways the early iPhone kinda sucked. Again, there were existing app ecosystems on Symbian/Nokia and Windows, and none of that stuff, or anyt…

The early iPhone sucked in ways similar to how the early iPod sucked, and was received with similar reactions. In both cases, the folks who predicted failure focused too much on the technical deficiencies of the V1 product and not enough on the game-changing difference in approach. In the iPhone’s case that meant betting fully on a multitouch screen with a rich, smoothly animated GUI, and wresting software control away from the carriers. I think the latter in particular was not sufficiently appreciated.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#75

Post by bryanlarsen »

indigoabstract wrote: post #61
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember 2 audience reactions really, really clearly from the original iPhone launch: 1. the reactions to "flick to scroll". 2. reaction to pinch-to-zoom. In both cases the audience was just gobsmacked: oohs, ahs and cheers all around. For people saying there were other devices out there at the time with similar or better hardware specs, or even comparable feature sets, I think you are totally missing the point. Th…

Yes, there were already phones with touchscreens before the iPhone, but they were all using a stylus, which seemed a better choice than a finger at the time, since they were more precise. But after the iPhone came out, it quickly became obvious how much better it was to use a screen with a finger with multi-touch than with a stylus. Steve or whoever made the decisions about the iPhone obviously knew very well what th…

Those stylus touchscreen phones had a 640x480 or an 800x600 resolution and a full web browser. They could use basically any web site on the internet.

The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version.

I figured that access to the entire web was a killer feature that would let the clunkier stylus phones compete successfully with an iPhone. Not a prediction that aged well.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#76

Post by kmeisthax »

gumby wrote: post #44

> Some have suggested that Apple will simply set up their own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) and just fund the subsidy… I was one who believed this up until the announcement. I grossly underestimated Jobs’ ability to negotiate/strong arm the carriers, who were and remain one of those industries who fear and proactively hate their customers. (Side point: I accidentally typed “nagotiate” which was autocorrected…

Jobs actually wasn't that good at negotiating - every carrier had rejected their strategy of "we just sell iPhones" rather than "we sell the Verizon $RANDOM_WORD powered by V-Cast". The carriers wanted to sell features piecemeal and control the user experience so they could extract more money out of you.

The only company that bit was Cingular, aka "the new AT&T", because they bought AT&T Wireless and took that brand for themselves. Before that Apple was actually considering an Apple MVNO[0], which was a fairly popular business arrangement in 2006 for some reason. The cost of getting their control was a five year exclusivity deal with AT&T, which would turn out to be a huge pain in the ass for iPhone users as AT&T's network was not at all designed to handle everyone being able to use data at the push of a button. In fact, it makes me wonder if the carriers were deliberately designing their other phones to make it more of a pain in the ass to use data...

[0] Mobile Virtual Network Operator. Basically any company that sells mobile service by renting out another company's network.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#77

Post by ajross »

wrs wrote: post #74
ajross wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'm "dismissing" anything. I replied to a comment that made what I think is an incorrect point about how the product was received at release. It's too easy to take a successful product and mythologize its origins, when in fact history was complicated and in a lot of ways the early iPhone kinda sucked. Again, there were existing app ecosystems on Symbian/Nokia and Windows, and none of that stuff, or anyt…

The early iPhone sucked in ways similar to how the early iPod sucked, and was received with similar reactions. In both cases, the folks who predicted failure focused too much on the technical deficiencies of the V1 product and not enough on the game-changing difference in approach. In the iPhone’s case that meant betting fully on a multitouch screen with a rich, smoothly animated GUI, and wresting software control aw…

Are you trying to argue with me as a proxy for the linked article? I didn't write it, and I didn't say any of that stuff you seem to be responding to. I'm explaining why it wasn't seen as a paradigm shift at the time, and that its dominance evolved over time (which is hardly surprising). Hyperbolizing history is generally a bad idea. The iPhone, as released, was a very mixed product.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#78

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #75
indigoabstract wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there were already phones with touchscreens before the iPhone, but they were all using a stylus, which seemed a better choice than a finger at the time, since they were more precise. But after the iPhone came out, it quickly became obvious how much better it was to use a screen with a finger with multi-touch than with a stylus. Steve or whoever made the decisions about the iPhone obviously knew very well what th…

Those stylus touchscreen phones had a 640x480 or an 800x600 resolution and a full web browser. They could use basically any web site on the internet. The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version. I figured that access to the entire web was a killer feature that would let the clunkier stylus phones compete successfully with an iPhone. Not a prediction that aged well.

> The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version.

That's just totally wrong. In fact, IIRC the original iPhone announcement showed a visit to the NY Times website to show how you could scroll around and zoom "full screen" websites.

If anything, the ability to navigate "desktop" sites on the iPhone was much better than other phones because those other versions of "full web browser" were clunky incarnations that made it difficult to zoom in and scroll around. It was pinch and double tap to zoom, and finger-on-screen to scroll that made browsing sites on the "normal" web much better than anything else at the time.

Re: Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)

#80

Post by dang »

pushcx wrote: post #37

The text is still online at the original site: https://www.theregister.com/2006/12/23/iphone_will_fail/ The outlet's snarky responses to reader letters are also available: https://www.theregister.com/2007/01/09/apple_iphone_letters/

Yes - we've changed the URL to that from https://web.archive.org/web/20070117233154/https://www.there... now. Thanks!

Submitters: it's suitable to post archive links in comments but not as submissions—so please don't submit archive links unless you've googled around for a current rendition of the article and have satisfied yourself that there's really no other way.

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